Category Archives: Biography

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS – SCRIPT ABOUT THE AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE

In a war there are more than just the men in the firing line. There are the superiors who risk their lives, to some extent, as well. The women, who must continue on with the lives their men left behind, the frustrated people who support neither warring faction and prefer to remain neutral and the men who are influenced by all of the above, who make the vital decisions that could change the face of the war. Lawyers, polymaths, inventors and… revolutionaries. A word that goes beyond ‘politician’. A word fitting to the three men that would play a role in the American Revolution in this script about the American war of Independence.

In three acts, Strange Bedfellows, documents a moment in time of the lives of Benjamin Franklin, Edward Rutledge and John Adams, who spent the night at a somewhat grotty tavern in New Jersey. Franklin brought with him his sense of humour, penchant for libations, ill-health in old age and a journal. Adams; his wife, Abigail’s, spirit, a staid disposition, passion and outrage at Franklin’s lack of etiquette. Rutledge; his cynicism, a suspicious and thought-provoking mind and a habit of falling asleep when inconvenient to do so. In this drama, the trio are on the cusp of realising what could very well be the first American Dream.

What say you to a night with Franklin, Adams and Rutledge?

Strange Bedfellows recently enjoyed a week long workshop at The Alabama Shakespeare Festival for their Southern Writers Project. It has been recognized by over a half dozen national writing competitions including The Stanley Drama Award and The Harriet Lake Festival of Plays. It was selected by Tony Award winning Broadway producer Ken Davenport for his Broadway Blacklist of the Top Ten Unproduced Plays of 2016.

Author: Jason Boies

Type: Three Act Play

Genre: Drama, Historical, Biography

Length: Ninety minutes excluding intervals

Cast: Cast of 7: 6M 1FMain Characters: 3 – M

Ages of the actors: From a teenage soldier up to a seventy year old Benjamin Franklin

Suitable for: All ages to watch, teens up to perform

Set: A tavern

Level of difficulty: 7/10 – getting the characters right, their mannerisms and accent of the times correct

THE PASSION OF MARY – AMERICAN HISTORICAL PLAY WITH TOPICAL ISSUES

Forty years before the Salem witch trials, Massachusetts’ Puritans were hanging other Christians for slight differences of opinion. The play THE PASSION OF MARY details the importance of the Separation of Church and State in early America through the battles and life story of a young woman that builds self-awareness and confidence while keeping her sense of humor intact in this American historical play.

“It wasn’t just witches they were hanging, but their own.” This is the story of Quaker Mary Dyer, who was hanged by Puritans in the Boston Commonwealth in the 1600s.

Featuring a cast of historical characters including early leaders Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, plus England’s Lord Oliver Cromwell, the play starts as Mary buries her child that was stillborn and disfigured. Within weeks Mary’s world crumbles, first seeing her best friend kicked out of Boston where they had settled for over 16 years. Then the colony’s leaders discover the dead baby, and publicize to the entire community that Mary gave birth to a monster. She, too, is excommunicated, and scorned by her neighbors.

Mary ends up in Providence, Rhode Island, with others that were kicked out of Boston. The open-minded Roger Williams invites Mary to visit England with him. It is their hope to create a positive relationship with the Native Americans that live in the new colony.

In England, Mary becomes versed in the loving deeds of Quaker beliefs, and helps soothe the country’s leader Lord Oliver Cromwell through his many fears. Though respected in England, she wants to return home to the new world where her family lives.

Upon her return, Mary’s ship lands in Boston where the Puritans have declared the Quaker religion as illegal. She is arrested. Because her husband still has political ties with the Commonwealth, she is set free and ordered to never return. Mary returns, and is arrested yet again. One of her party is put to death. Mary’s husband, who has been fighting to keep his wife at home, realizes the Puritans’ cruelty, and finally offers his blessing for Mary to return again. His support allows her to sacrifice her life for religious freedom.

Upon Mary’s death, she is welcomed to the afterlife by her child, the one that the leaders of Boston referred to as a “monster.”

ON GOLDEN WINGS – PLAY ABOUT GIUSEPPE VERDI

The time – 1841. The place – Milano. Bartolomeo Merelli, Inspector General of the Royal and Imperial Austro-Hungarian Theatres makes his way to the poorer quarters in Milano intent on a special mission. The mission – to make composer Giuseppe Verdi compose once more. Verdi, once a talented opera composer has given it all up and means to teach following several tragedies in his life including the death of his beloved wife and their two children and the failure of his most recent comic opera. Merelli means to change all that by convincing him to write a masterpiece, namely, the opera ‘Nabucco,’ about the Hebrew slaves in Babylon. But will he convince him to do so in this play about Giuseppe Verdi?

‘On Golden Wings’ was a runner up at the Mark Twain Playwriting Competition in Harford, CT and was performed at Theatre Studio NYC in two productions and later at Yale University in New Haven, CT.

Author: A. Giovanni Affinito

Genre: Biography

Type: One act play

Cast: 2M

Ages of the actors: Adult

Suitable for: All ages

Length: Thirty minutes

Set: A drably furnished room, with a door, a coat stand, a wooden table and three chairs and a battered piano in it, with an oil lamp on the table.

DELIVERANCE – PLAY ABOUT JOAN OF ARC

This play is a costume drama based on part of the life of Joan of Arc exploring the conflict between religious faith, skepticism, and religious bureaucracy with a little politics thrown in. It presents quite nicely the stress-induced myopia or shortsightedness of the rulers of a country when fortunes have turned against them, in this case battles lost against the English invaders.

The biography of Joan of Arc is generally well known, but the details of her life and exploits differ from one historian and chronicler to another. What? When? How? and, at times, Who? are matters which the experts have argued about for years.

The author has employed poetic licence to depict and at times exaggerate some of the incidents in Joan’s life, for instance her encounters with Baudricourt who did not have a wife named Melisende or a daughter called Maree or indeed a servant, Isabelle.

The other characters existed, apart from Stephen, James and Martin who are a figment of the author’s imagination and in this respect the same could be said for most of the business at Chinon, Charles de Poitiers acting as the Dauphin, Joan’s identification of the Dauphin and the other incidents and references to Poitiers and Orleans. The interweaving facts are merely based on accounts left to us by witnesses, and contemporary and subsequent chroniclers.

THE SERPENT UNDER IT – DRAMA PLAY ABOUT HELEN DUNCAN – WWII MEDIUM

This play is based on the true story of Helen Duncan, the spiritualist medium imprisoned towards the end of the Second World War under the 1734 Witchcraft Act. It is a story of Government hypocrisy, personal tragedy and wartime dilemmas and it had and retains a mystery at its heart.

A multi-faceted, complex play which invokes either sympathy or dislike for the characters and the situations in which they find themselves yet encourages the viewer to question their own feelings. Given the circumstances, would the viewer react as did the characters in the play or would they react differently? The play encourages a deeper understanding of the world and our part we play in it.

From a production viewpoint, this play about Helen Duncan has some challenging roles for actors to get their teeth into and also some smaller parts for new actors to gain experience.

FRIDA AND DIEGO – PLAY ABOUT FRIDA KAHLO

A good portion of the art world is getting ready to mark the 60th anniversary of Frida Kahlo. Frida and Diego is a biographical play about Frida Kahlo and her husband, Diego Rivera. The tempestuous artist was not always easy to love, but her husband, Diego, loved her dearly throughout their two marriages. This story is about their love.

Author: Tony Broadwick

Genre: Biography of Frida Kahlo

Type: One act play

Length: 40 – 50 minutes

Cast: Requires two females and one male.

Ages of the actors: Adult

Suitable for: PG 12 – language

Set: a 1940’s apartment bedroom. There is a bed with a vase and some flowers in it on a bedside table.

Level of difficulty: 7/10 – portraying a character that actually existed.

A BEATLE’S STORY – PLAY ABOUT THE BEATLES AND HOW THEY FORMED

This play about the Beatles is basically a conversation between John Lennon and Paul McCartney about replacing their Bass player, Stu, and who on earth they are going to get to replace him. Stu has decided to stay behind in Hamburg after their tour in Germany and get married….and he didn’t like Paul taking the piss out of him all the time. A fast paced funny play by best selling playwright Morley Shulman, with snappy lines in the style of the classic Beatles films such as ‘ A Hard Day’s Night.’

MERSEY BOYS – SCREENPLAY BASED ON THE LIVES OF THE BEATLES

In this screenplay based on the lives of the Beatles, the famous British 60’s pop group, a young American College Professor, Al Moran moves to Liverpool to lecture at the local art college. There he encounters the student John Lennon and the two soon become friends. As John’s music and his band become more popular, Al becomes a firm supporter of the band and lends his influence to their music. Mersey Boys follows the story of how the Beatles grew from a small band playing in the local nightclubs to a worldwide sensation. The script is a nice mix of fact and fiction that brings the characters to life. Mersey Boys is based on a book by the same name published under Celtic Badger.

DISNEY IN DEUTSCHLAND – DRAMA PLAY ABOUT HITLER + WALT DISNEY

In August, 1935, Walt Disney and his wife Lillian were invited by the League of Nations (in Paris) to receive a prize for the international popularity of Mickey Mouse. As this was Walt’s first holiday in years, he suggested they make it a tour of Europe. The well-known animator was invited by dignitaries of all sorts, including Mussolini. The Volkische Beobachter, the official newspaper in the new Nazi Germany, welcomed Disney as ‘a hero against the Jews of Hollywood,’ and it is recorded that he met with Hitler in Munich. What they said at their meeting, and precisely where it happened, is still unclear, but Disney was known to have admired Hitler back in the US, even attending bund rallies in support of the Nazis. (See DISNEY’S WORLD by Leonard Mosley, and other sources). Disney also expressed antipathy toward the growing union movements in the Hollywood studios, calling them a Jewish conspiracy. And indeed, in 1938, Disney invited Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl to Hollywood, where her visit was roundly boycotted by other studio heads.

The Neutschwanstein Castle (referred to in the play) was designed by Ludwig of Bavaria in the 1860s, to celebrate the music dramas of Richard Wagner. This castle’s design is remarkably similar to the Sleeping Beauty castle used in most Disney theme parks to this day; and it was one of the Fuhrer’s favourite places. ‘Disney in Deutschland’ is a full length one act biography based on these very events. Warning: Because of the nature of the play about Hitler and Walt Disney, the characters it contains do make some anti Semitic remarks and references, which may offend sensitive readers.

Author: John Powers

Genre: Biography, Drama play about Hitler

Type: Full Length One Act Play

Length: 1.5 -2 hours

Suitable for: All ages

Ages of actors: 30’s to late 40’s, thirty to late forties

Number of actors: Six, 6 4M, 2F

Set: Simple – long elegant table upstage centre, projection of the Alps upstage through the windows and a model of ‘The New Germania’ – the new capital of the Third Reich they were designing in the foreground.

Off The Wall Plays – Online Play Publishers since 2010

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AND ALL HIS SONGS WERE SAD – PLAY ABOUT SEAN MCCARTHY

“AND ALL HIS SONGS WERE SAD” follows the life and works of Irish songwriter Sean McCarthy. It is a drama following the life of this talented musician, who was inspired by the everyday people and events around him, and from these everyday people, created songs of beauty that will be sung for many years to come in this play about Sean McCarthy.

This play was staged by the Pantagleize Theatre Group in Fort Worth, Texas in October 2010 and by the Superior Theatre Company, Douglas, Wisconsin in June 2011.

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